Aaron siskind biography
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Though he began his career as a documentary photographer, Aaron Siskind turned away from representation and towards abstraction in the s, using his camera to capture the graphic patterns, shapes, and forms he observed around him. By carefully framing his subjects, he would transform strands of seaweed on the sand into calligraphic brushstrokes, peeling paint into low-relief sculptures, or graffiti on a wall into a Franz Kline canvas. Siskind influenced and was influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, his photographs frequently exhibited alongside their paintings.
- Chicago 21,
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- LA,
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- Wickenberg, Arizona 2,
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- Irapuato,
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- Mexico,
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- VR a,
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- Untitled, c.
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- Chicago 10,
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- Feet ,
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- Metal Hook, early s
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- Feet 39,
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Born December 4
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Biography
Born in New York City, förnamn Siskind graduated from the City College of New York in and taught high school English until he became interested in photography in In he joined the Film and Photo League in New York, a group of documentary photographers devoted to improving social conditions in contemporary kultur through their pictures. While involved with the League, Siskind made some of his most successful and well-known documentary photographs, including those for The Harlem Document (), but he had a falling out with the organization in At the time, his work was assuming a new, more abstract focus, as evident in Tabernacle City, a series of photographs depicting the vernacular architecture of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When his exhibition of this series at the Photo League caused many members to protest his photography outright, he left the organization and found support among Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and other painters, who recognized his elimination of pictorial
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Summary of Aaron Siskind
Aaron Siskind's early work as a social documentary photographer is best seen in his contributions to the Harlem Document (), a survey of life in Harlem. Siskind also identified with the ideas and styles of the Abstract Expressionist artists in New York in the s. In these later photographs he continued to emphasize the modernist concern with the flatness of the picture plane, but intensified his approach to picture making - with close-up framing, as well as emphasis on texture, line, and visual rhymes - creating abstract images of the real world.
Accomplishments
- Siskind turned the medium of photography on its head, taking pictures of found objects that were simultaneously true-to-life and abstract; he was one of the first photographers to combine what was known as "straight" photography (recording the real world as the lens "sees" it) with abstraction.
- Siskind found emotional joy and tension in the process of discovering subjects and photographing th